Apple iPhone top smartphone in UAE, but Nokia leads among all handsets in the region

In the oil drenched UAE, one of the richest regions in the world, smartphones represented 51% of the mobile handsets registered on UAE networks. That represented a gain of 10% last year and 5% in the fourth quarter alone. The top smartphone in the area, with 3% of the total registrations, is the Apple iPhone 5. On the heels of the iPhone 5 is the Samsung Galaxy S III with a 2.6% share of activations.

Taking all handsets (not just intelligent ones) into consideration, Nokia has a majority market share in the UAE with a whopping 51.5% share. We do have to point out that this number has actually been declining. Samsung is next with 17.9% of all handsets in the region followed by BlackBerry (9.0%), Apple (8.4%), LG (0.9%), HTC (0.7%), Huawei (0.5%) and Sony (0.3%). Apple and Samsung showed growth in Q4, while BlackBerry and Nokia both had declining market share during the period. The top three handsets in the fourth quarter included the Nokia 101/1010 (3.9%), the Nokia 1280/1282 (3.6%) and the iPhone 5 (3.0%).

From October 1st through December 31st of last year, Apple iTunes was among the most visited application websites. Facebook and Twitter were the top social networking messaging sites with market shares of 84% and 13% respectively.

Nobody is anywhere yet, feature phones and low end smartphones are still fairly entrenched. This being because now a large majority of the population are migrant workers. It'll take a while still for the smartphone segment to mature.

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